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Thursday, 17 November 2011

A key skill in negotiation, in diplomacy, in conflict resolution and in conflict itself is getting inside the head of the other party or parties, whether they be individuals, groups, political parties, trades unions – or nations.

This applies whether your objective is to shift viewpoints and perceptions, reach agreements or defeat the other party. When I was a child, my adult cousin Peter used to take me to a boxing club in Dalmarnock. He didn’t box himself, but was an avid follower of the sport. (This was the era of Benny Lynch.) I remember sitting talking to one of the fighters who was taking a breather. My cousin Peter asked him what was the essential thing in preparing for a competition bout.

“Watching the guy yer gonnae fight in a bout wae somebody else.” he replied. “Ye’ve goat to get intae his style, an’ intae his heid as well – an’ ye’ve goat tae decide whit kind o’ man he is.” He looked down at me, wiping his face with a towel. “Never forget that, son – ye’ve goat tae ken whit kind o’ a man he is.If he’s the kind that’ll dae onything tae win, then he’s ultimately a loser – real men ken where tae draw the line …””

I can’t say I understood those words at the time, but they came to mean more to me as I got older. Later in industry, American bosses were fond of maxims. “Understand what made them the way they are, respect that, then find out what they want. If you can give them some of it and still get what you want, negotiate. If you can’t, sooner or later you’ve got a fight on your hands. But you may have to live with them after the fight …”

Having said that, I now feel like an unctuous little radio vicar pumping out platitudes on Thought for the Day – “Life is like an ashtray – full of wee doubts ..” (BILLY CONNOLLY).

So let me return to a more hard-edged analysis -

CUI BONO?

The maxim of Cassius -that in considering a position being advanced one must ask “Who gains, or benefits from this?” The American version, used by journalists and police investigators alike is “Follow the money”.

Political philosophies usually claim that the answer is the people, and politicians therefore claim to have the interests of society and the people at heart. Some do and some don’t, and it is a moot point which motivation is the more dangerous – the wholly altruistic motive or the narrowly self-interested. The former has often produced political and religious fanaticism and the latter endemic corruption. Both at the extremes can result in dictatorship, totalitarianism and repression.

Without sinking into a morass of PPE degree analysis, most political philosophies, most politicians and most voters are a mix of both – it’s a question of where the balance lies, and significantly, exactly where those supporting a particular view stand on the question of the ends justifying the means.

Let’s take a topical example – the current criticisms of the electoral system used to elect the Scottish Parliament – the d’Hondt system.

We’re straight into cui bono country here, because the Electoral Reform Society champions proportional representation and is against the first-past-the-post (FPTP) system. So they would say that wouldn’t they?

But unionists and the unionist media have leapt on to this, displaying the hypocrisy and doublethink that characterises so much of what they say, because the outcome of the Scottish May 2011 election came as a profound shock to them, and they don’t like it.

Why?

Because the d’Hondt system was supposed to stop the nationalists ever gaining an overall majority, and thus being able to govern and call a referendum on independence. The system was expressly designed by the UK to prevent the nationalists gaining power.

Of course, it wasn’t presented in this way when the Parliament was set up and the Scotland Act defined the rules of the game. There was much talk of balance and democracy, and the two largest parties, Labour and the SNP, but it was clearly targeted at the SNP.

Now the unionists are bitterly regretting that they didn’t adopt STV – the single transferrable vote system. Under that, the SNP would have won in May but would have still been a minority government, and the three opposition parties could have happily continued their game of frustrating the SNP government from really coming to grips with the endemic problems of the nation, e.g. sectarianism and alcohol abuse, by cynically ganging up to oppose any legislation to address them.

Where does the hypocrisy lie?

The answer to that is as plain as a pikestaff – the Tory Party and a large block of the Labour Party, while piously urging proportional representation on Scotland, was engaged in a vicious, no holds barred – and successful - campaign to protect the first-part-the-post system for the UK and Westminster. Devolution was designed to neuter the Scottish National Party – and any other nationalists – by denying them real power, while the good old Empire got on with the unrepresentative, unelected conspiracy of wealth, power, privilege and the military/industrial complex masquerading as a modern democracy, i.e. the United Kingdom.

Needless to say, the Electoral Reform Society see themselves as loftily above this sort of thing, arguing that STV would have protected the Scottish people against both Labour and SNP dominance. Aye, right …

And so I come full circle, back to my Dalmarnock boxer, broken-nosed, sweaty, and wise. We must decode every message from the Unionists, and we must be alert to the fact that the messages often come obliquely, often cloaked in a heavily-spun regurgitation of objective comments from organisations and institutions that claim to be apolitical – the Electoral Reform Society, Citigroup, the CBI, the Inst. of Mech. Engineers and the Law – organisations and institutions that entirely coincidentally always seem to choose to speak at a time and on a topic that equally coincidentally suits a unionist/UK agenda and is hostile to a nationalist agenda.

Of course, these entities have the highest standards of ethics, probity and objectivity and would be outraged at a suggestion that they are politicised in any way. But to believe that they are not subject to influence, subtle and on occasion almost subliminal influence – influence that they may well be unaware of, and would indignantly reject if it were overt – is naive. Organisations and institutions are comprised of people – people with careers, people who are members of clubs, people who are members of political parties or who have a political viewpoint, people who have family traditions.

The most effective forms of influence are not overt, and over centuries, the British Establishment has developed an all-encompassing web of influence, patronage and preferment, with a backup of coercion in reserve. All those who live in the expectation of a gong, of a knighthood, of a baronetcy, of the ermine know that such baubles are not obtainable from nationalist parties such as the SNP – they come only from the British Establishment and its front-end democratic simulacrum, the Westminster Parliament.

So look at the men who speak and then - “ye’ve goat tae decide whit kind o’ men they ur. If they’re the kind that’ll dae onything tae win, then they’re ultimately losers – real men ken where tae draw the line …”

May I return to my Thought for the Day vicar persona and close by saying that in our present highly polarised political debate and grossly unequal and divided society, the professional men and women of the Electoral Reform Society, Citigroup, the CBI, the Inst. of Mech. Engineers and the Law would never be collectively swayed by political considerations, but should be aware of how their wholly professional and objective views and advice might be spun by politicians.

Tuesday, 3 May 2011

Before I get to the papers, a word about the BBC. What master programme planner decides that we all put our brains into neutral on a bank holiday, and demand, instead of regular news and current affairs programmes, a fractured schedule comprising truncated news broadcasts with the time filled with trivial re-runs and repeat entertainments programming?

Are we supposed to lose our interest in current affairs, politics and major events so that we may frolic in the garden or on the beach, occasionally watching the crap that has replaced the news on a portable?

Back to the papers and that strange species called Scottish journalists and political commentators. (I won’t list my usual exceptions, those whom I recognise as fine examples of the honourable Scottish journalistic tradition, because some have fallen off the plinths I erected for them in the last week or so, destabilised from their bases by the terrifying spectre of imminent Scottish independence, a wraith visible to everyone except the SNP, nationalists supporters, and apparently the majority of the electorate, who have more practical concerns.)

I ask three baseline things of a journalist, accurate facts, a reasonable command of English, and a little sensitivity. The Scotsman, in an otherwise excellent Election 2011 supplement today, manage to fall at the first two hurdles on page 5.

Andrew Whitaker fails the English test on this paragraph -

You can count on a close-run election race (para 10)

Should Ms Boyack, an ever-present in the Scottish Parliament since 1999, be defeated and the swing against her is repeated across Scotland, then we may be set for a fairly comfortable SNP win.

I’m sure you can see what’s wrong here, Andrew. If not, things are worse than I thought …

Eddie Barnes fails the factual accuracy test on his 3rd paragraph here, on the arithmetical process applied to the constituency vote -

How the voting system works

The constituency votes are counted first. Once these results are in, election officers tally up the votes in each region and then divide that sum by the number of seats each party has won within that region. The party with the largest figure gets a regional seat. That seat is added to their tally and the process is repeated until a total of seven regional MSPs are elected. The effect is to give more seats to parties which have failed to win constituency seats, but have secured a significant chunk of votes.

The method adopted for proportional representation in the Scottish Parliament is the d’Hondt method, Eddie, not the Barnes method. The votes in each region are divided by 1 + number of seat won, not by the number of seat won as you say.

An example should suffice to demonstrate what would happen if the Barnes method were used rather than the d’Hondt method.

Party gets 100,00 votes and wins one seat - 100,000 divided by 1+1 = 2. Party’s vote is now 50,000, and it is re-ranked on the list.

At a time when there is, inconveniently, a UK-wide ballot on a different method, and the Scottish system may not be at all clear to many voters in the Holyrood election on Thursday, this is not a trivial error for one of Scotland’s two main newspapers to make.

I think in the interest of democracy and accuracy, an immediate correction and apology should be published prominently tomorrow in The Scotsman.

N.B. If I have got this wrong, Eddie, I will immediately apologise and retract my error.

THE SENSITIVITY CRITERION

On page 33 of the main paper, Hugh Reilly, in a piece entitled Cross purposes over how to cast a vote, has the following sentence in a paragraph (para 6, second column) -

Having hurdled the constituency vote with as much grace as a one-legged amputee, …

I cannot believe I’ve just read that in a quality newspaper, Hugh.

Many ‘one-legged amputees’ compete with considerable grace in sports of all kinds, and the main factor that has produced ‘one-legged amputees’ in recent years has been the tide of horrific injuries sustained by servicemen and women serving their regiment and the country in two wars.

Their grace is of a kind that few can display - it is the grace of loyalty to comrades and to their profession, and it is all the greater because it has been displayed in misconceived conflicts that have been entered into by politicians who are not in harm’s way, almost never place their adult children in harm’s way, and who totally lack anything that resembles grace.

I think Hugh Reilly owes an apology to Scotsman readers and to those he treats so casually in his cheap, throwaway remark.